This paper examines a fundamental supposition of Kant’s moral philosophy, namely, that, without transcendental freedom, understood as the quality of the will by which it determines itself to act without being affected by sensible motives, we could not impute to any putative agent immoral acts. I argue theoretically against the logical sense of the supposition (showing its aporetic consequence), and I also demonstrate how superfluous it is from a practical point of view. Nevertheless I acknowledge to Kant, in spite of (...) some well known Nietzschean reasons, the merit of having grasped the insurmountable human attachment to the idea that we are arbitrary or transcendentally free beings. Finally, some instances of the echo of this merit in contemporary authors (Nagel, Strawson, Dennett) are reviewed. (shrink)

Trois courts textes qui se présentent comme trois petits traités sur le bonheur, sur ces trois "complexités" énigmatiques qui enchantent et illuminent nos vies : l'amour, la poésie et la sagesse, et les liens qui les unissent. Issus de conférences prononcées en 1990 et 1995.

Factive mental states, such as knowing or being aware, can only link an agent to the truth; by contrast, nonfactive states, such as believing or thinking, can link an agent to either truths or falsehoods. Researchers of mental state attribution often draw a sharp line between the capacity to attribute accurate states of mind and the capacity to attribute inaccurate or “reality-incongruent” states of mind, such as false belief. This article argues that the contrast that really matters for mental state (...) attribution does not divide accurate from inaccurate states, but factive from nonfactive ones. (shrink)

Discusses the nature and functions and philosophical foundations of law as well as the central problems of legal method.

When and why does it matter whether we can give an explicit justification for what we believe? This paper examines these questions in the light of recent empirical work on the social functions served by our capacity to reason, in particular, Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory of reasoning.

The past decade has seen a renewed interest in moral psychology. A unique feature of the present endeavor is its unprecedented interdisciplinarity. For the first time, cognitive, social, and developmental psychologists, neuroscientists, experimental philosophers, evolutionary biologists, and anthropologists collaborate to study the same or overlapping phenomena. This review focuses on moral judgments and is written from the perspective of cognitive psychologists interested in theories of the cognitive and affective processes underlying judgments in moral domains. The review will first present and (...) discuss a variety of different theoretical and empirical approaches, including both behavioral and neuroscientific studies. We will then show how these theories can be applied to a selected number of specific research topics that have attracted particular interest in recent years, including the distinction between moral and conventional rules, moral dilemmas, the role of intention, and sacred/protected values. One overarching question we will address throughout the chapter is whether moral cognitions are distinct and special, or whether they can be subsumed under more domain-general mechanisms. (shrink)

Two concepts have polarized the philosophical debates on functions since the 1970s. One is Millikan's concept of ‘proper function’, meant to capture the aetiology of biological organs and artefacts. The other is Cummins's concept of ‘dispositional function’, designed to account for the real work that functional devices perform within a system. In this paper I locate Hegel's concept of biological function in the context of those debates. Admittedly, Hegel's concept is ‘etiological’, since in his account the existence of purposive organs (...) is explained by appeal to their purpose, yet, against Millikan's concept, Hegel's does not presuppose the phenomenon of natural selection nor derives the function of tokens from the function of types. So, my aim is, first, to present Hegel's approach to biological functions as one neither purely etiological nor purely dispositional. It will appear rather as an example of an organizational account, that attributes function according to present performances and emphasizes the role of functional parts in their self-production within the system they belong to. Finally, I briefly discuss how Hegel's concept performs against common objections to organizational accounts. (shrink)

The most outstanding feature of this book is that here, for the first time, is made available in a single volume all the important historical essays Edgar Zilsel (1891-1944) published during WWII on the emergence of modern science. This edition also contains one previously unpublished essay and an extended version of an essay published earlier. In these essays, Zilsel developed the now famous thesis, named after him, that science came into being when, in the late Middle Ages, the social (...) barriers between the intellectuals and the artisans were eroded, due to the fact that the rapidly expanding commercial classes of that period had a keen interest in improvements in technology. This class was city-based and stimulated a social environment in which men of learning came to regard the craftsmen and technicians with a new respect, in which they no longer felt any contempt for manual work and in which theory and practice were eventually combined to produce modern science. This critical edition also carries a long introduction in which much new material about Zilsel's life and work is presented. It suggests that a radical new look at Zilsel's project needs to be taken. Zilsel's essays on the history of science look like a standard case study to substantiate a particular position on the origins of modern science, but they were also an attempt to show that lawlike explanation in history and social theory is possible. It is claimed that Zilsel's historical essays were a part of another project he was working on which focused on the idea that social phenomena were open to causal explanation as much as physical phenomena. Hence the volume also contains the essays Zilsel wrote in relation to this other project. Previously there have been published a German and an Italian edition of the Zilsel essays. This edition is the first in English; compared to the other two editions this one is the first that includes unpublished material and the first to undertake a serious effort to research Zilsel's life and work. What is special about this volume is the well-articulated social perspective it takes on the origins of modern science. Audience: Students in early modern social history/history of science as well as professional philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science. (shrink)

Time passed after the commission of a wrong can affect how we respond to its agent now. Specifically it can introduce certain forms of complexity or ambivalence into our blaming responses. This paper considers how and why time might matter in this way. I illustrate the phenomenon by looking at a recent real-life example, surveying some responses to the case and identifying the relevant forms of ambivalence. I then consider a recent account of blameworthiness and its development over time that (...) purports to account for this ambivalence. Blameworthiness, on this account, consists in a psychological flaw; time matters because it brings the possibility of change in the agent, and ambivalence arises because it is hard to know to the extent of such change. This account, I argue, mischaracterises responses to the case and misidentifies the source of their ambivalence. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of emotion, I sketch an alternative approach. Our responses, I suggest, make sense within processes through which we address wrongdoing. Time matters because these processes take time and because time’s having passed raises the question whether and how the wrong has been addressed. Unaddressed wrongs can elicit ambivalence of a specific form. (shrink)

While children’s experiences of online risks and harm is a growing area of research in New Zealand, public discussion on the matter has largely been informed by mainstream media’s fixation on the dangers of technology. At best, debate on risks online has relied on overseas evidence. However, insights reflecting the New Zealand context and based on representative data are still needed to guide policy discussion, create awareness, and inform the implementation of prevention and support programmes for children. This research report (...) presents findings from a quantitative study regarding different aspects related to risks and online safety. It looks at the online experiences that children find bothersome and upsetting and explores the hurtful behaviours they encounter or engage in, both online and in person. Evidence regarding exposure to different types of potentially harmful online content is also presented. Another relevant contribution is the insights related to excessive internet use.The findings presented in this report are based on data from 2,061 New Zealand children aged 9-17. We hope the findings will contribute to the development of policies, practices and services designed to support New Zealand children to safely take advantage of the opportunities available to them online. (shrink)

Charles Taylor claims that not only Kant, but also successors of Kant such as Fichte and Hegel, advocate a primitive concept of action, namely, a basic, irreducible, indispensable concept allegedly essential to our self-understanding. This paper shows how philosophers like Robert Brandom agree with Taylor explicitly with regard to Hegel, and attribute to him transcendental non-metaphysical arguments in support of such a concept. It then proceeds to challenge this attribution, offering a brief presentation of an alternative non-transcendental metaphysical approach to (...) the Hegelian idea of giving actuality to a concept through a productive activity. (shrink)

Will works of the imagination ever regain the power they once had to challenge and mould society and the individual? This was the question posed by Edgar Wind's influential Reith Lectures delivered in 1960 and later expanded into his book Art and Anarchy. The book examines the various forces that have fashioned the modern view of the art, from mechanization and fear of intellect to connoisseurship and--perhaps the fundamental weakness of our age--the dispassionate acceptance of art. In the course (...) of his discussion, Wind surveyed a wide range of topics in the history of painting, literature, music, and the plastic arts from the Renaissance to modern times. (shrink)

We received several commentaries both challenging and supporting our hypothesis. We thank the commentators for their thoughtful contributions, bringing together alternative hypotheses, complementary explanations, and appropriate corrections to our model. Here, we explain further our hypothesis, using more explicitly the framework of evolutionary social sciences. We first explain what we believe is the ultimate function of fiction in general (i.e., entertainment) and how this hypothesis differs from other evolutionary hypotheses put forward by several commentators. We then turn to the proximate (...) features that make imaginary worlds entertaining and, therefore, culturally successful. We finally explore how these insights may explain the distribution of imaginary worlds across time, space, age, and social classes. (shrink)

Alan Turing is often portrayed as a materialist in secondary literature. In the present article, I suggest that Turing was instead an idealist, inspired by Cambridge scholars, Arthur Eddington, Ernest Hobson, James Jeans and John McTaggart. I outline Turing’s developing thoughts and his legacy in the USA to date. Specifically, I contrast Turing’s two notions of computability (both from 1936) and distinguish between Turing’s “machine intelligence” in the UK and the more well-known “artificial intelligence” in the USA. According to my (...) proposed historical interpretation, Turing did not view computations in the real world to be exhaustively and deterministically characterized by his automatic machines from 1936. (shrink)

In the popular imagination, the relevance of Turing's theoretical ideas to people producing actual machines was significant and appreciated by everybody involved in computing from the moment he published his 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers’. Careful historians are aware that this popular conception is deeply misleading. We know from previous work by Campbell-Kelly, Aspray, Akera, Olley, Priestley, Daylight, Mounier-Kuhn, Haigh, and others that several computing pioneers, including Aiken, Eckert, Mauchly, and Zuse, did not depend on Turing's 1936 universal-machine concept. Furthermore, (...) it is not clear whether any substance in von Neumann's celebrated 1945 ‘First Draft Report on the EDVAC’ is influenced in any identifiable way by Turing's work. This raises the questions: When does Turing enter the field? Why did the Association for Computing Machinery honor Turing by associating his name to ACM's most prestigious award, the Turing Award? Previous authors have.. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Wissenschaft ist geprägt durch Ausdifferenzierungs- und Pluralisierungsprozesse, wodurch konkrete Forschung in Ansatz und Reichweite immer fokussierter und partikularer wird. Eine solche Spezialisierung ist einerseits sehr wünschenswert, birgt aber gerade für den in Disziplinen agierenden Diskurs bzw. das System Wissenschaft gewisse Schwierigkeiten in sich. Mit dem Ruf nach mehr Interdisziplinarität versucht Wissenschaft und die auf sie angewiesene Gesellschaft zu reagieren. Interdisziplinarität braucht aber klare Disziplinarität. Vor diesem Hintergrund will dieser Beitrag ein Angebot machen, Disziplinen nicht über bestimmte Gegenstände, Methoden oder (...) Perspektiven zu definieren, sondern diskursstrukturell zu denken – als über ihre Fragestellung auf der Meta-Ebene identifizierbare Diskurse. (shrink)

Research and practice about self-determination in the context of disability has centred on teaching skills and providing support to help people with impairments to be independent. However, limited research exists about the impact of Information and Communication Technologies, in particular social media and mobile devices, on the development of self-determination skills among people with disabilities. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study which collected data from observations, a researcher diary, focus groups, individual interviews and data from social media. (...) The focus of the study was on young people with vision impairments who were transitioning to university life. The study found that the participants developed self-determination skills by using and adapting collaborative and interactive online tools and mobile devices according to their transition needs. This finding expands the understanding of the implications of new technologies for young people with disabilities’ personal development and the enhancement of self-determination. (shrink)

To explore social media use in New Zealand, a sample of 1001 adults aged 18 and over were surveyed in November 2021. Participants were asked about the frequency of their use of different social media platforms (text message included). This report describes how often each of the nine social media sites and apps covered in the survey are used individually on a daily basis. Differences based on key demographics, i.e., age and gender, are tested for statistical significance, and findings summarised.

About thirty years ago, when the Internet started to be commercialised, access to the medium became a topic of research and debate. Up-to-date evidence about key predictors, such as age, is crucial because of the Internet's ever-changing nature and the challenges associated with gaining access to it. This paper aims to give an overview of New Zealand's Internet access trends and how they relate to age. It is based on secondary analysis of data from a larger online panel survey with (...) 1,001 adult respondents. The Chi-square test of independence and Cramer's V were used in the analysis. The study provides new evidence to understand the digital divide. Specifically, it uncovers a growing disparity in the quality of Internet connectivity. Even though fibre is the most common type of broadband connection at home, older adults are less likely to have it and more likely to use wireless broadband, which is a slower connection type. Additionally, a sizable majority of people in all age categories have favourable opinions on the Internet. Interestingly, this was more prevalent among older people, although they report an increased concern about the security of their personal information online. The implications of the results are discussed and some directions for future research are proposed. (shrink)

This book reminds readers of the insatiable attraction of the “blue highway”—“But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk—times neither day or night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color.

Imaginary worlds are extremely successful. The most popular fictions produced in the last few decades contain such a fictional world. They can be found in all fictional media, from novels (e.g., Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter) to films (e.g., Star Wars and Avatar), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece and Naruto), and TV series (e.g., Star Trek and Game of Thrones), and they date as far back as ancient literature (...) (e.g., the Cyclops Islands in The Odyssey, 850 BCE). Why such a success? Why so much attention devoted to non-existent worlds? In this paper, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt our preferences for exploration, which have evolved in humans and nonhuman animals alike, to propel individuals toward new environments and new sources of reward. Humans would find imaginary worlds very attractive for the very same reasons, and under the same circumstances, as they are lured by unfamiliar environments in real life. After reviewing research on exploratory preferences in behavioral ecology, environmental esthetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary and developmental psychology, we focus on the sources of their variability across time and space, which we argue can account for the variability of the cultural preference for imaginary worlds. This hypothesis can, therefore, explain the way imaginary worlds evolved culturally, their shape and content, their recent striking success, and their distribution across time and populations. (shrink)

This research report presents findings about the extent and nature of digital self-harm among New Zealand teens. Digital self-harm is broadly defined here as the anonymous online posting or sharing of mean or negative online content about oneself. The report centres on the prevalence of digital self-harm (or self-cyberbullying) among New Zealand teens (aged 13-17), the motivations, and outcomes related to engaging in this behaviour. The findings described in this report are representative of the teenage population of New Zealand by (...) gender, ethnicity and age. Key findings are: Overall, 6% of New Zealand teens have anonymously posted mean or negative content online about themselves in the past year. Teenagers’ top reasons for this behaviour were: making a joke, wanting to show resilience, looking for friends’ sympathy, and seeking reassurance of friendship. By exploring the nature and extent of this behaviour, we are providing the online safety community, schools and parents with insights about a complex and, to some extent, hidden phenomenon involving New Zealand teens. (shrink)

Narrative fictions have surely become the single most widespread source of entertainment in the world. In their free time, humans read novels and comics, watch movies and TV series, and play video games: they consume stories that they know to be false. Such behaviors are expanding at lightning speed in modern societies. Yet, the question of the origin of fictions has been an evolutionary puzzle for decades: Are fictions biological adaptations, or the by-products of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for another (...) purpose? The absence of any consensus in cognitive science has made it difficult to explain how narrative fictions evolve culturally. We argue that current conflicting hypotheses are partly wrong, and partly right: narrative fictions areby-productsof the human mind, because they obviously co-opt some pre-existing cognitive preferences and mechanisms, such as our interest for social information, and our abilities to do mindreading and to imagine counterfactuals. But humans reap some fitness benefits from producing and consuming such appealing cultural items, making fictionsadaptive. To reconcile these two views, we put forward the hypothesis that narrative fictions are best seen asentertainment technologiesthat is, as items crafted by some people for the proximate goal to grab the attention of other people, and with the ultimate goal to fulfill other evolutionary-relevant functions that become easier once other people’s attention is caught. This hypothesis explains why fictions are filled with exaggerated and entertaining stimuli, why they fit so well the changing preferences of the audience they target, and why producers constantly make their fictions more attractive as time goes by, in a cumulative manner. (shrink)

I respond to Lennart Nordenfelt's analysis of dignity by questioning his attempt to establish an objective standard by which dignity can be determined. I approach this by considering the way in which claims to dignity may be contested and defended. This leads, in the cases of dignity of merit and dignity of moral status, to an apparent relativism. This relativism is checked by further consideration of dignity of identity, and in particular by consideration of the nature of the processes that (...) serve to humiliate people. It is suggested that acts of humiliation attack certain competences that human beings develop as embodied, social beings. Menschenwürde may then be articulated as an account of human nature, in terms of the human potential to develop a series of core competences. This account of human nature aspires to universality, and as such offers an objective ground to dignity. This paper is a product of the research project on Dignity and Older Europeans Programme, Contract No QLG6, 2001, 00888). (shrink)